Dissociating familiarity from recollection using rote rehearsal

Recollection-based recognition memory judgments benefit greatly from effortful elaborative encoding, whereas familiarity-based judgments are much less sensitive to such manipulations. In this study, we have examined whether rote rehearsal under divided attention might produce the opposite dissociation, benefiting familiarity more than recollection. Subjects rehearsed word pairs during the "distractor" phase of a working memory span task, and were then given a surprise memory test for the distractor items at the end of the experiment. Experiment 1 demonstrated that increasing rehearsal elevated the recognition rate for intact and rearranged pairs, but neither associative recognition accuracy nor implicit fragment completion benefited from rehearsal. The results suggest that rote rehearsal leads to a greater increase in familiarity than in recollection, and that the increase in observed familiarity cannot be attributed to effects of repetition priming. In Experiment 2, we tested item recognition with the remember/know procedure, and the results supported the conclusions of Experiment 1. Moreover, a signal detection model of remember/know performance systematically overpredicted rehearsal increases in remember rates, and this worsened when high-rehearsal items were assumed to be more variable in strength. The results suggest that rote rehearsal can dissociate familiarity from recollection at the time of encoding and that item recognition cannot be fully accommodated within a one-dimensional signal detection model.     

Gender Schema and Social Judgments: A Developmental Study of Children from Hong Kong

The purpose of the study was to examine inferences and judgments of gender schematic and aschematic children. Kindergarten, third grade, and sixth grade Hong Kong Chinese children (n = 196) were categorized into schematic and aschematic groups on the basis of their reaction times to gender-stereotypic and counterstereotypic items. The children were then asked to make several inferences and judgments about four male and female targets behaving gender-stereotypically or counterstereotypically. Both age and gender schematicity were related to the children's inferences. Older children and gender-schematic children relied more on individuating information and younger children relied more on the gender label. The results are discussed within the framework of gender-schema theories.     

Fractioned Reaction Ttme in Power-Trained and Endurance-Trained Athletes under Conditions of Fatiguing Isometric Exercise

Fractionated knee extensor and plantar flexor reaction time (RT) components were assessed in a group of eight weightlifters and eight long distance runners. Following a 4-day period of baseline stabilization for each muscle group, a 50% maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) holding-time exercise was administered. Results showed that the runners had longer premotor times (PMT) than the weightlifters in the knee extensors, but had much faster PMTs than the lifters in the plantar flexor condition. Compared to previously reported investigations using non-athletes, the data for the present sample of athletes indicated faster total reaction times (TRT) in both the knee extensors and the plantar flexors. A resistance of 15% MVC applied during the RT task resulted in a lengthening of the motor time (MT) component in both groups prior to exercise. However, while knee extensor resisted motor time was lengthened by the exercise task, no such lengthening occurred in plantar flexor resisted RT. It is concluded that power-trained and endurance-trained athletes exhibit differences in response to a fractionated RT task, under both baseline and fatiguing exercise conditions.     

Monitoring,blunting, and the ability to achieve cognitive structure

It has often been suggested that vigilant information-seeking helps reduce uncertainty and coping with stress. The present paper argues that additional information can resolve uncertainty only to the extent that it is adequately structured or categorized. However, people may differ in their ability to achieve cognitive structure (AACS) and therefore in their ability to achieve certainty. This postulate may shed new light on Miller's (1987) findings that high monitors suffer from greater distress than low monitors. It is suggested that when high monitors have high AACS they will suffer from less psychological distress than low monitors. This interaction will not be found when blunting is involved. To examine these hypotheses, both AACS and information-seeking behavior of 77 rheumatoid arthritis patients were assessed. The two hypotheses were confirmed even after discounting the effect of subjective health perception and number of years subjects suffered from the disease.     

The influence of aging on poststroke depression using a rat model via middle cerebral artery occlusion

Poststroke depression (PSD) is the most frequent psychological sequela following stroke. While previous studies describe the impact of age on brain infarct volume, brain edema, and blood–brain barrier (BBB) breakdown following ischemia, the role of age on PSD has yet to be described. Here, we examine the influence of age on PSD progression in a rat model of PSD by middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO). One hundred forty-three rats were divided into three groups. 48 rats 20 weeks of age underwent a sham procedure, 51 rats 20 weeks of age had MCAO, and 44 rats 22–26 months of age had MCAO. Groups were further divided into two subgroups. The first subgroup was used to measure infarct lesion volume, brain edema, and BBB breakdown at 24 h. In the second subgroup at 3 weeks after MCAO, rats were subjected to a sucrose preference test, two-way shuttle avoidance task, forced swimming test, and a brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) protein level measurement. Total and striatal infarct volume, brain edema, and BBB breakdown in the striatum were increased in older rats, as compared with younger rats. While both old and young rats exhibited depressive-like behaviors on each of the behavioral tests and lower BDNF levels post-MCAO, as compared with control rats, there were no differences between old and young rats. Although older rats suffered from larger infarct volumes, increased brain edema and more BBB disruption following MCAO, the lack of behavioral differences between young and old rats suggests that there was no effect of rat age on the incidence of PSD.     

Stroop effects in bilingual translation

In two experiments, bilinguals proficient in English and Spanish translated words from one language to the other. In each experiment, following the target word to be translated, distractor words were presented after a short (200-msec) or long (500-msec) stimulus onset asynchrony. In Experiment 1, the distractor words appeared in the language of production and were related to the meaning or form of the spoken translation. The results replicated past studies in demonstrating that semantically related distractor words produced Stroop-type interference, whereas form-related distractor words produced facilitation. In Experiment 2, the distractors appeared in the language of input and were related to the meaning or form of the target word itself. In contrast to the results of Experiment 1, there were only marginal effects of the distractors on translation performance. These results suggest that language cues related to the nature of the input in translation may serve to reduce competition among lexical competitors during lexicalization. The contrast between these results and those in bilingual picture-word interference studies provides important constraints for models of language production and for claims about the locus of language selection.     

Distinctiveness and the recognition mirror effect: evidence for an item-based criterion placement heuristic

Superior detection and rejection of 1 versus another class of items during recognition is called the mirror effect. Some mirror effects may involve strategic criterion adjustments based on item distinctiveness and its relation to memorability. Three experiments demonstrated mirror effects for known versus unknown scenes and 1 suggested a similar pattern for faces. In opposition to preexperimental familiarity, lures from known and frequently encountered locations were confidently rejected more often than unknown lures. Forgetting and speeding recognition reversed this lure response pattern, suggesting abandonment of strategic adjustment in favor of a single fixed criterion. With sufficient response time and recent encoding, observers demand more evidence for conceptually distinctive items, perhaps because such items typically foster vivid recollection during retrieval.     

Beyond the Issue of Ordination

The alienation of sacramental life as a power to be used over and against the community is the basis of all false clericalism; such clericalism is deeply rooted in sexist symbols of domination and passivity. Women cannot ask to be ordained without questioning fundamentally this concept of clericalism.     

The bizarre mnemonic

Summary Five experiments measured effects of bizarre contexts on the free recall of noun triplets after brief retention intervals. More triplets were remembered from bizarre than from common contexts in short mixed lists (12 sentences) when the sentences were presented at a controlled (10 seconds/sentence) rate, regardless of incidental task (rating images for bizarreness, vividness, or memorability). The average number of words/sentence recalled, however, tended to be higher for common than for bizarre contexts. No memory benefit from bizarreness was found for pure lists nor for lists containing more than six triplets in bizarre contexts. The bizarreness effect was less when the subject controlled the rate of presentation. A sixth experiment, which tested recall after immediate and two-day retention intervals, found that the Bizarre/Common Context by Pure/Mixed List interaction increased over longer retention intervals.